Irradiated Seeds Combat World's Most Serious Wheat Disease
Wheat Stem Rust-Resistant Plants Grow at Eldoret University in Kenya Greg Webb / IAEA In Kenya, two new varieties of wheat are resistant to a fungus that defeated even Norman Borlaug's resistant plants. Kenyan farmers last week got a first look at two new varieties of wheat that are resistant to the number-one threat to worldwide wheat production. They got to see resistant and non-resistant wheat side by side in fields. The Kenyan government is also giving away the first batch of seeds-six metric tons of it-to seed producers, in hopes their fields will serve as visual persuasion to their neighbors to try the new stuff. "Wheat stem rust has the ability to turn a healthy-looking crop only one week away from harvest into a tangle of black stems," Liang Qu, the director of the Joint FAO/IAEA Programme, tells Popular Science. "They can see the difference." The story of how that wheat...